Prompting the latest mystery surrounding Bitcoin Ordinals, someone air-dropped 21,000 digital inscriptions on Sunday as part of an apparent game promotion.
“A technological arms race has begun – 21,000 advanced RSICs, manufactured in our factory, are being sent from our distribution centers to the Ordinals community,” reads a message in inscription 56.754.110. “The RSICs are designed solely to secure a bag of runes. These runes will be etched in our foundry after the rune protocol on Bitcoin is launched.”
BREAKING: Someone Just Enrolled a 21,000 Piece Generative Art Collection on Bitcoin as an Airdrop to the Ordinals Community!
Check your address at https://t.co/f1ZPqme1Qh and sort by newest registrations to see if you have one!
All inscriptions → https://t.co/RSJTGhFXA1 pic.twitter.com/tP0o0x0H52
— Ord.io (@ord_io) January 22, 2024
Although the group behind the airdrop calls itself Runecoin, it appears to have nothing to do with the Runes concept designed last year by Ordinals’ original developer Casey Rodarmor.
The Runecoin rules provide the backstory: all 21,000 RSIC inscriptions were initially manufactured, but can no longer be produced due to a ‘mysterious explosion of the factory and distribution centers’. These RSICs are dropped to the Ordinals community, giving RSIC holders three options: mine runes, sell RSICs on the market, or fade their RSICs. Runecoin said that 10% of the RSICs are reserved for the game designers.
What adds more mystery to the game is that the parent inscription only reads: ‘deploy more inscriptions’.
Last week, a post on the Bitcoin blockchain contained a riddle that caused a stir in the Ordinals community.
“10,000 sats, side by side,” reads the message in Ordinals inscription 55.365.041. “A single UTXO, untouched inside. Born together, cursed in heart and soul. Built with code, Bitcoin Art.” The mysterious message was followed by a series of numbers: 391481082118 – 391481092117.
The inscription ‘game’ sparked excitement among some of the Ordinals faithful, with more than 33 BTC, a volume of around $1 million traded so far, according to Magic Eden. However, others questioned the airdrop’s claims and the way it was advertised on social media.
“While the RSIC approach is new and unique, there is absolutely no guarantee that this will be the first rune ever, nor does this team have any idea what the final protocol will look like,” said crypto podcast host and product manager at Emblem Vault Jake Gallen. wrote. “Unless this is actually @rodarmor behind it.”
Gallen, a key contributor to the BRC-20 platform Omnisat, can – like many others – only speculate about who is behind Runecoin, saying that calling the air-dropped inscriptions “runes” is a misrepresentation gives of the reality of what a potential buyer gets.
“This can be very damaging to first-time buyers who don’t know what they are getting into when they buy an inscription,” Gallen said. Declutter in an interview. “They think it’s a rune, though [Runes Protocol] won’t be live for another three months.”
Although Gallen’s previous statements on social media have been called “FUD,” he emphasized the importance of transparency and providing all available public information for informed decision-making. He expressed concern about users engaging in activities without full knowledge and argued against such uninformed actions.
“You can call this FUD or whatever you want, but the truth is the marketing behind this is just not true,” Gallen continued. “This whole post can of course be refuted, but if you’re going to play this game, here you go [do your own research] DYOR and make sure you understand the entirety of what is being presented before simulating your sats.
So let me make this clear….
A project called RSIC brought 80% of a 21,000-unit supply to Bitcoin Puppets, Bitcoin Frogs, NodeMonkes, and OMB holders. Then keep 20% of the offer.
The promise is “this is the very first rune of Bitcoin”.
If you listened to the most recent one… pic.twitter.com/Eu0PZbRI7D
— jake.sats (@jakegallen_) January 22, 2024
“The way the RSIC airdrop was done by @rune_coin is very neat, and I hope airdropping to the Ordinals community becomes a trend, but this kind of marketing needs to be called out,” the pseudonymous NFT historian and Ordinals collector tweeted Leonidas.
Calling it a red flag, Leonidas warned that Ordinal enthusiasts should wait until the release of the Rune Protocol before jumping into a project under that name.
“It’s clearly not the first Rune on Bitcoin, and Casey has stated multiple times that no Runes are Runes until the protocol actually goes away and a first Rune token is actually minted onto the chain,” Leonidas said. “I hate that RSIC is marketing itself in this way and especially that it will mislead mainly ‘average’ people in the Ordinals community, who don’t spend the time to fully understand why a claim like this is blatantly untrue.”
To add more confusion to the airdrop, the Runecoin Twitter account said that the runes protocol has not yet been launched and no runes have been etched.
“We think this is a fun distribution mechanism that can be used for many things, including runes, and we wanted to experiment and have fun with it. We hope you will too,” the Runecoin account said.
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.